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Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
141–150 of 224 posts
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#142This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…
My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project from 2008 back.
I’m sure you can find any given opinion in a community of 2m registered users with a public mailing list, especially any community which includes a bunch of 17-year old Linux enthusiasts, but it’s not remotely representative of the OSM community nor a particularly useful subset to identify.
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#143no. I wish osm would adjust their licensing to prevent reuse of contributions to build non free (as in open) servicing.
It's the permissive vs. free software license debate. In practice there are people who won't be able to use the data for their use case if a non-permissive license is applied.
I find the distinction difficult to understand. The way I interpret the OSM license, the data is really not freely available to use in a commercial context except as a base layer. If you use the OSM data in combination with any other data sources you have to publish both the resulting dataset and any processing steps or algorithms used to produce the dataset. So that means you cannot combine OSM data with any dataset which cannot be released, and it also means any innovation you develop in processing the data cannot be protected.
I can see why the license was chosen, clearly it's necessary to prevent Microsoft or Apple taking the data and closing it off for their use, but at the same time it seems to make most business models using the data unsustainable. It's a shame from a HN perspective, you'd hope open data would allow for the continual opportunity for the creation of startups to innovate on using the data, locking open competition in the same way that open software has done, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way. Most companies in the area seem to be creators and consumers of base layers, I don't see many doing anything with the geographical database.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the terms of the license.
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#144> It may be mainly made by individuals in there spare time, but the big tech companies are making millions of it.
Dude please proof read. I walk into an article making a statement and the very second sentence has errors like this, you're losing credibility.
> They are reasonably good at fixing and contributing data to OSM in those regions. They employ nobody in the OSM community.
Except whoever contributes data to OSM in those regions? The same for every example in the list. Amazon is literally mapping towns for all of us and giving it away for free. What's the criteria for "in the OSM community" if not "contributes to OSM"? What's the point of FOSS if not this?
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes: https://2020.stateofthemap.org/sessions/SPRQVZ/ > nearly 17% of the global road network was last edited by a corporate data-team member.
...and their share of edits is growing. Maybe one day OSM mappers will wake up and realize they provide free labor to corporate giants that sucks economic value from community. Hopefully it will be not too late.
Can you expand on how contributions suck economic value from the community? What community, and what value is being lost?
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#146This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…
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Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#147This article is just factually wrong. It alleges repeatedly that Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc “employ nobody in the OSM community”. They do. Microsoft even employed the founder of OSM, Steve Coast, for a while. If your criterion is ‘involved in OSM prior to current employment’, I could name a bunch of people currently working for Facebook, Amazon, Snap etc of whom that’s true. (One such person even stood for electi…
My experience with the more extreme OSM folks is that as soon as you are working for a large company, you are no longer a member of the community. More generally, there is nothing the big companies could do to make them happy, short of divesting completely from OSM so that they can get their hobby project from 2008 back.
I've never talked to anyone like this, not sure where you get it from.
You get people that are suspicious and cautious about big corp sponsorship of OSM, and rightly so, EEE was and still is a thing. But in OSM, contributors are contributors, plain and simple.
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#148To me this article reads like "I want to get a job paid by the big players". The fact is, it's not a one way street, they're contributing back with data. We all benefit from this.
While I dislike what these companies stand for (I use a Linux desktop and a degoogled phone) in this case I don't think they're in the wrong.
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#149It's a good question to ask. Many here probably aren't old enough to remember the cautionary tale of CDDB/Gracenote [1]. Back when Compact Discs were still a thing. on Winamp, WMP, etc you wanted to display a list of tracks, covert art, the artist, etc. Volunteers contributed this data from their own discs (that could be identified). This was before MP3s and ID3 tagging. So volunteers built the CDDB with this data. T…
In a way it is how Google operates: One can send in details about shops and corrections for the maps, but Google is the sole owner of the resulting map.
With OSM however I have the same rights to the combined data as any other entity.
Re: Should you contribute open data to OpenStreetMap?
#150I've enjoyed Google Maps for many years and never paid for it. Apple MapKit appears to be free. I improve the experience for others when I help improve the maps and in turn my experience is improved by the contributions of others. It's costs Google and Apple money to provide the infrastructure for this, which they obtain in various ways such as advertising. It doesn't bother me if someone wants to advertise their sto…
Question: if I contribute a fix to Google Maps or Apple Maps, does that fix back-propogate to OSM? My home address needs to be slightly shifted and wondering for best practice.
The answers saying “no” are not necessarily correct, but the actual answer depends on which country you live in.